That China’s era of reform ended under Xi Jinping is hardly surprising. What may surprise many people is that Xi himself keeps saying it.

On July 1, at the celebration marking the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Xi said that through the “great practice of revolution, construction, reform, and the New Era,” the party led the people through untold hardships and successfully opened up and upheld the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics. That sentence amounts to a declaration: China’s reform era has ended.

That China’s era of reform ended under Xi Jinping is hardly surprising. What may surprise many people is that Xi himself keeps saying it.

On July 1, at the celebration marking the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Xi said that through the “great practice of revolution, construction, reform, and the New Era,” the party led the people through untold hardships and successfully opened up and upheld the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics. That sentence amounts to a declaration: China’s reform era has ended.

Of course, this is not the first time Xi has used such a formulation, one designed to put himself into the grand narrative of CCP history. As early as his 2021 speech marking the party’s centenary and in the CCP’s third historical resolution, Xi had already divided the party’s history into four stages: revolution, construction, reform, and the New Era. This time, he simply restated that narrative in more compressed language and further gave it the stamp of official approval.

By Xi’s reckoning, the revolutionary stage runs from the party’s founding in 1921 to the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. The construction stage runs from 1949 to the beginning of reform in 1978. The reform stage runs from 1978 to Xi’s rise to power in 2012. After that comes the New Era, which continues to the present.

Under the older CCP narrative, the party’s history was generally divided into three stages: the revolutionary period, when it fought for power; the socialist construction period after victory; and the........

© Foreign Policy